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Choose My Plate

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has released new guidelines to help consumers evaluate their current nutritional habits and adopt healthier choices. The old, sometimes confusing Food Pyramid has been replaced with MyPlate, a simple graphic of a plate divided into basic food groups to help consumers make better eating choices based on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (you can read the whole policy document here).

The main points of the new guidelines have been summarized into a few Key Consumer Messages:

Enjoy your food, but eat less.

Avoid oversized portions.

Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.

Make at least half your grains whole grains.

Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.

Choose foods with less sodium.

Drink water instead of sugary drinks.

On the site's interactive tools page, you can, among other things, look up and compare nutritional information for different foods with MyFoodapedia.gov; or analyze your own eating habits with the food tracker, where you can plug in everything you've been eating lately and see how your current diet compares to the suggested guidelines. Happy and sad emoticons, along with the concrete numbers, tell you what you're already doing right and what you might want to work on. :)